Tuesday, February 20, 2024
Year : 2, Issue : 8
Hauling coals against a leaden sky, Cillian Murphy opened the Berlin Film Festival on Thursday with “Small Things Like These”, in which the “Oppenheimer” star portrays a man sagging under the twin burdens of a traumatic childhood and an oppressive present.
Set in Catholic Ireland in the 1980s and based on Claire Keegan’s novel of the same name, the film casts Murphy as a coal merchant father consumed by guilt and indecision over whether to save a girl locked up in a “Magdalene laundry” run by nuns.
“The irony of the book is that it’s a Christian man trying to do a Christian act in a dysfunctional Christian society,” said Murphy, who has an Oscar nomination for “Oppenheimer”.
Ireland’s Magdalene laundries, the last of which shut down in 1996, were workhouses for women accused of immorality – often for falling pregnant out of wedlock. Inmates were forced to toil as washerwomen in slave-like conditions for the benefit of a religious order that kept them far from the eyes of a guilt-ridden society.
Source: Reuters
